Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Alive and/or dead?

The way I understand this business is this: if you peer deep enough into atomic structure you find a very iffy reality. Particles appear and vanish and re-appear in two places at once. Quantum heads call this the realm of possibility, not reality. At this level, existence may be shaped by thought and perception. If true, then the creation of the universe is a perpetual act driven by collective sentience.

The interesting thing about the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox is the genesis of the essay itself. Few people realize that by May of 1933, only two years before he would publish his now famous essay, that Schrödinger himself was already squarely in the clutches of a full blown cat frenzy. Details are sketchy but it is known that as early as 1929 he enjoy having kittens around his desk while he worked and that often they would bother him for attention.

His journal entries from the fall of 1934 indicate that on at least two occasions cats disturbed sensitive experiments he was performing, causing him to exclaim, ‘shoo you bad kitty’. An early draft of the paradox essay has a mouse as the unwitting quantum roulette victim and contains a hand written remark in the margin, ‘felinus interruptus’. Subsequent drafts refer only to a black and white tabby named Peaches who may or may not have been the inspiration for the ‘diabolical quantum killing device’ itself. His diary entry of March 13, 1935 contains the cryptic phrase; ‘need pan liners’ and a last minute addition to the paper, made the same day, warns perspective researchers that such devices: ‘…must be secured against direct interference by the cat’. The published paper: ‘The present situation in quantum mechanics’ contains what appears to be coffee stained paw prints across the title page. Though the essay itself was an immediate hit at cocktail parties across the nation, Schrödinger saw little benefit as he deplored finger food and had an irrational fear of camembert cheese.

During his last few years Schrödinger remained interested in mathematical physics and continued to work on general relativity, unified field theory and meson physics. Schrödinger died in 1961 having never confronted his feline daemons. A letter written in 1946 by Einstein and read at his funeral described the quirky physicist as a model scientist but urged him to change the litter more often.

I think it was a mistake to name a collection of probabilities. Words are used to hypnotise us, though with the proper training, they can help clarify our world-views. Think aabout Schrodinger's Cat this way: we cannot justify whether it is dead or alive, the most useful tool for dealing with it is to talk about it in probabilities. Whenever I read something on the subject it says that the probabilities that the cat is dead and alive are 50-50, but then they say that it seems both dead AND alive, which to me seems inconsistent.

According to one interpretation of quantum physics, there are lots of universes. Reality is constantly splitting up into an infinite(?) number of possible realities. And (I imagine?) worldlines with the same outcome are constantly merging. Maybe it's where worldlines are merging that particles act like waves, and where worldlines are splitting up that particles act like particles.

The worldlines only split as soon as the box is opened, but not before. While the box stays closed, lots of worldlines where the box was closed at slightly different moments merge, causing the particles to act like waves.

I guess certain parts of worldlines stay merged as long as they have the same effect on their surroundings. As long as the box stays closed the cat is both alive and dead. This kind of looks like an optimization for an algorithm that's trying to calculate everything that could possibly happen. It doesn't need to calculate any local set of events twice.

God must be a programmer then. Or maybe this is evidence that we do indeed live inside a big simulation.

Too bad nobody understands the guy. Once you seriously study wave math in school, you become aware how many scenarios are guided by its various tricks. Erwin simply took this awareness two or three steps further, using known physical exemplars, and said reality IS the wave math........ WHEW!.... Was he kidding or what? No he wasn't. He later said that life & consciousness appear to spontaneously arise, as if they were physically mandated by hyper-mathematical rules as yet uncalculable. Was he right? I don't know yet, but he WAS smart enuf to figure out the first stuff. If he's right, an amorphous ball (or toroid) of wavelets IS reality. Any consciousness observing any wavelet, collapses its quantum entanglement into Newtonian particlehood, casting new thermodynamic (particle based) entanglements outward as photons. So those of us who think, are in the process of building the Newtonian universe. What an honor, I would say!

The ramifications of this become very dicey, leading to spooky spirituality rants which may be overblown (or may not).The one thing you can be certain of is..... YOU ARE IN CHARGE.

Schrödinger’s Cat is a lesson in our perception of reality. The field of arising potential, which is the fabric of quantum reality, exists within the eternal now...with all possibilities occurring simultaneously.

It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive).

Curiosity killed the cat...or did it?

What I know about quantum physics could fit on the head of a pin without much inconvenience to the dancing angels, but I like Schrödinger’s Cat. It was what first helped me get my head around the fact that particles just don't behave like "big things", and that to try to understand them in those terms was an excercise in frustration and futility. And as a bonus, it's endlessly useful for humor, particularly if you're fond of puns or unfond of cats.